Management as a system: creating value

Boston University School of Management publication from the 1990s about the MBA programs at BU, aimed at prospective MBA students

The Obama Administration's 2010 Call Letter for Medicare Advantage and Prescription Drug Plans: Implications for Beneficiaries

Outlines key provisions and changes in the Medicare Advantage or Medicare Prescription Drug plans in 2010. Discusses requirements to improve accountability, promote informed health plan choices, and increase beneficiary protections

Designing an Open Virtual Factory of Small and Medium-sized Enterprises for Industrial Engineering Education

Curriculum of Industrial Engineering program must accomplish the requirement that graduates have the ability to design, develop, implement, and improve integrated system that include people, materials, equipment and energy. However, it is not easy to implement a curriculum that fosters such competencies. One of the strategies to achieve that is using an innovative learning media, so that the problem-based learning (PBL) can be accustomed. In this paper, we design a web-based enterprise resources planning. It is aimed to capture the real problem of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in bottled drinking water industries. The integrated system can be illustrated as ERP application that designed by using free open source software (FOSS). This research aimed to utilize the application to improve teaching methods in IE education. The result of the research can be used to improve the competencies of IE students, especially the abilities to identify, formulate, and solve the activities of the business process improvement in SMEs. Keywords Industrial engineering education, FOSS, innovative learning media, problem-based learnin

Relative Importance of Environmental Attributes Using Logistic Regression

We investigate the problem of determining the relative importance of attributes in the discrete choice setting. Four alternative methods of extracting the relative importance of attributes are considered. The empirical application involves the development of a risk index system for individual herbicides combining the information on the herbicides' different human and environmental risks. The values of the pesticide risk indices are found to be consistent across the different methods.Environmental Economics and Policy,

Effectively Regulating E-Cigarettes and Their Advertising—and the First Amendment

If tobacco smoking did not exist in the United States, there would be no reason, from a public health perspective, to allow addictive, nicotine-containing e-cigarettes to be marketed and sold. Because e-cigarette use, by itself, is neither beneficial nor benign to users and nonusers, the only public health justification for allowing e-cigarettes in the existing U.S. market would be if doing so would not sustain or increase existing smoking levels but would help smokers quit completely or provide addicted smokers a less harmful way to obtain the nicotine they crave. Yet e-cigarettes are now pervasive in the U.S. market, being sold with unnecessary harmful characteristics and being advertised in ways that encourage youth experimentation and use. Unless effectively regulated, e-cigarette use will be more harmful than necessary and their advertising will work to: (a) increase initiation among both youth and non-tobacco-using adults; (b) prompt former smokers to relapse back into addicted nicotine use; (c) encourage smokers to use e-cigarettes where they cannot smoke; and (d) prompt smokers to switch to e-cigarettes instead of quitting all tobacco and nicotine use. This paper proposes a viable way to regulate e-cigarettes and their advertising both to minimize the health harms they might cause and to allow e-cigarettes to fulfill their potential as cessation aids or harm-reduction products. Normally, any efforts by FDA to establish effective advertising restrictions must accommodate considerable constraints from the First Amendment’s commercial speech protections. However, because of existing text in the Tobacco Control Act, on the effective date of the final FDA deeming rule that puts e-cigarettes under FDA’s active tobacco product jurisdiction all nicotine-containing e-cigarettes will be on the U.S. market illegally until they can obtain permissive orders from FDA. That situation should reduce applicable First Amendment constraints, providing FDA with a tremendous opportunity to place the kinds of substantial restrictions and requirements on e-cigarette advertising necessary to minimize their harmful aspects and maximize their potential to produce substantial net public health benefits

Towards a Holistic Approach to Designing Theory-based Mobile Health Interventions

Increasing evidence has shown that theory-based health behavior change interventions are more effective than non-theory-based ones. However, only a few segments of relevant studies were theory-based, especially the studies conducted by non-psychology researchers. On the other hand, many mobile health interventions, even those based on the behavioral theories, may still fail in the absence of a user-centered design process. The gap between behavioral theories and user-centered design increases the difficulty of designing and implementing mobile health interventions. To bridge this gap, we propose a holistic approach to designing theory-based mobile health interventions built on the existing theories and frameworks of three categories: (1) behavioral theories (e.g., the Social Cognitive Theory, the Theory of Planned Behavior, and the Health Action Process Approach), (2) the technological models and frameworks (e.g., the Behavior Change Techniques, the Persuasive System Design and Behavior Change Support System, and the Just-in-Time Adaptive Interventions), and (3) the user-centered systematic approaches (e.g., the CeHRes Roadmap, the Wendel's Approach, and the IDEAS Model). This holistic approach provides researchers a lens to see the whole picture for developing mobile health interventions

Designing behaviourally informed policies for land stewardship: A new paradigm

This paper argues the case for a new approach to the stewardship of land resources that uses behavioural science theory to support the design and application of policies that facilitate changes in behaviour by those who develop policy and the farmers who implement it. Current approaches have: focused on legally-based expert system; and have been devised by national and international bureaucracies with little or no knowledge of how land owners and managers are motivated, and how they think, behave and operate as stewards of their natural resources. A review of current approaches from the social scientific literature is provided, with a particular focus on principles from social psychology. This is followed by an examination of how these principles can be applied to influence behaviour related to land restoration and soil conservation. Examples of the problems with traditional approaches and the evolution of new approaches with full engagement of farmers as the delivery agents are provided from within the European Union, Iceland and Scotland. In the light of these examples and emerging thinking in other parts of the world, the paper sets out the basis for a new approach based on behavioural science theory and application, reinforcing the arguments already made in the literature for a social license for farming

On the Twain Food Supply Chain in China - Impact of Supermarket Development on Agricultural Sector and Agrifood Safety in China

Food safety is attracting more and more attention by sectors of various kinds. However, the contradiction faced by China is the continuous growing safety and quality agrifood market and export demand together with large volumes of distributed and un-organized small-scale rural household production. If we cannot effectively organize agrifood production of distributed rural households, provide technical guidance, and exercise supervision during the production process, it is obvious that it is difficult to supply safety and quality agrifood in large volumes, sustainably and steadily. In the first place, this study has put forward the fact that the rapid development of supermarket in China has created favorable and irreplaceable objective conditions for safety and quality agrifood production in China. The management and supervision costs over supermarket supply chain by the society and government departments are much lower than those in traditional country fairs and wholesale markets. We can adopt the model of "supermarket + leading enterprises (agrifood suppliers) + rural households," to guide thousands of small-scale rural households to access to supermarket supply chains so as to speed up the pace of the popularization of safety and quality agrifood.safety agrifood, agrifood distribution, supermarkets, agrifood supply chain, small-scale farmers, Marketing,

Farmer groups enterprises and the marketing of staple food commodities in Africa:

"There are some apparently successful cases of collective marketing with staple food commodities (grains and root crops), but these are less common than cases involving higher value agricultural products. These can be attributed to the benefit/cost ratio to participants being generally higher for collective marketing of the higher-value crops. Some of the costs are ‘hidden', in the sense that they are borne by individuals in time spent in attending meetings, and not shown in the financial statements of the enterprises concerned. Examining a series of cases, the paper advocates an approach to the marketing of staples which involves analyzing the value chain and identifying those activities which on the one hand, best lend themselves to individual initiative, and those where on the other hand, group approaches are more likely to prosper. Dual purpose food marketing involving village storage in anticipation of both external market opportunities and local lean season shortages usually falls into the former category. Collective initiatives have a higher probability of success when they complement agricultural intensification and involve bulking substantial quantities of produce for quality-conscious commercial buyers. Prospects for successful collective marketing are moreover greater where there is a history of collective endeavor, where focused on simple activities like bulking and distribution of inputs, where primary groups are small and homogenous in terms of interests and objectives, where they can establish lasting relationships with strong trade counterparties, where supported by effective training (especially re attitudes, numeracy, and business skills), where they can access effectively managed storage and inventory credit services, and where there is framework of law enforcement. The immediate poverty alleviation and programmatic priorities of funding agencies often undermine the effectiveness of promotional activities in support of collective marketing. This problem may be addressed by instituting systems of independent review and peer review processes, and involving open discussion of pros and cons of individual and collective approaches." authors' abstractCollective marketing, Producer organization, Staple food, Village storage, Inventory credit, Microfinance, Disbursement-driven,

Consumer finance: challenges for operational research

Consumer finance has become one of the most important areas of banking, both because of the amount of money being lent and the impact of such credit on global economy and the realisation that the credit crunch of 2008 was partly due to incorrect modelling of the risks in such lending. This paper reviews the development of credit scoring—the way of assessing risk in consumer finance—and what is meant by a credit score. It then outlines 10 challenges for Operational Research to support modelling in consumer finance. Some of these involve developing more robust risk assessment systems, whereas others are to expand the use of such modelling to deal with the current objectives of lenders and the new decisions they have to make in consumer finance. <br/